Book excerpt: Tagalog, spoken in Manila and the surrounding provinces, Luzon, Philippines, is a major language of the western branch of the Austronesian family. The bulk of this book is devoted to parallel words also found in Malay, a member of the same branch. These words are either cognates descending from Proto-Austronesian or borrowings from the same foreign languages. Other cognates were found in Javanese, Malagasy, Tahitian and even Siamese. The last third of the book deals with Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and English loanwords.